As the car's passenger door swings open, Ray Sloan knows what he has to do. Death wants to take someone on it's road trip to hell, and Sloan will be damned if he lets her snatch a small boy in his place.
Rushing through the crowd in a hurried manner that he usually reserves for his run from store detectives, he catches up with the phantom car and with a breath of hope he leaps through the opened door, which promptly slams shut.
In the driver's seat sits Dave Sanderson, appearing younger than ever. The view out the front windshield isn't Farmer Bradley's farm but rather a snow swept street and a speeding ice-cream truck.
"Dave, is it you?" Sloan asks, out of breath from not only his run but from unbelievable terror.
Dave shrugs off his partner's strange question and reminds Sloan they are in hot pursuit of a stolen ice-cream truck as the windshield demonstrates by being belted with cones full of strawberry and chocolate scoops from the truck's back open door.
Thinking he has been given a second chance to put right what once went wrong, Sloan insists they pull the car over and not pursue the truck across frozen Lake Tardis.
Officer Sanderson does not concur, and engages the windscreen wipers to clear off the attacking ice cream cone smudges. A struggle over the steering wheel insures and before either of the cops know it, their car raptures the thin ice and crashes into the freezing water below.
As they rapidly sink, Sloan comes to the realization through shivering breathlessness that he is wrong- he hasn't come back to stop the patrol car accident. Instead he has come back to live life. He won't shy away from the world but embrace the days and years that await. He will be the one to marry Nan Sanderson and have many children, making the taunting grandfather clock not the sole grandfather in his house.
He pulls himself through his half opened window, fighting the inrush of heavy water. After swimming to the surface of the lake, Sloan washes up on the same shore as before.
Happy and thrilled to be alive in the past, Ray Sloan is suddenly devastated to catch sight of his reflection in the lake. Staring back at him is not the young man he had been in 1955 but his current old, wrinkled self. Yes, he had been sent back in time but his youth was not there waiting for him like a new suit on a hanger.
Two police offices were reported missing the next day this time around. Officers David Sanderson and Ray Sloan were never found.
The patrol car was a different story, however. It was recovered from Lake Tardis' murky depths almost straight away. Why was the car found this time around and not the first half a century of investigations?
Ray Sloan will tell you it's because the car wasn't even down there, not at least until it had offered Sloan a second chance to unbuckle his partner's seatbelt and rescue him from a watery grave.
A word to the wise- everyone deserves a second chance, and like everyone, Ray Sloan got one but selfishly misread it's instructions. Ray Sloan, like so many others, failed his second chance in life and now must live yesterday as the man he sees in the mirror- a man wrinkled not by age but from missed opportunities, and grayed by guilt.
Like all of us, Ray Sloan had regrets about the past, but who discovered that the past had bigger regrets with him and was able to settle an old score, by way of a rusting police car that now sits at the entrance to town as a memorial for two missing police officers. But in reality only one is missing. Case in point, officer Ray Sloan- a man who drove away from his missing in action life only to turn up missing completely in... the Twilight Zone.